CROSSROADS

  In Peck's Traveler’s Directory for Illinois for 1839 the earliest maps of settlements are shown. It is no accident that in DuPage these should be Brush Hill, Cass, Naperville, and Warrenville. In three of the four cases they were located where rivers and roads crossed. All the villages were along major road routes.

  Cass was the only one not on a main water­way, but it was located strategically on the Potawatomi thoroughfare, the "High Prairie Road," connecting Chicago to Ottawa. In 1831 the Cook County Board converted that Indian trail into a highway, calling it Plainfield Road: it later became U. S. Route 66.

  The first stage coach operating west of Chicago, that of Dr. John L. Temple and soon purchased by Frink & Walker, made the initial run over this route in 1834. Thomas Andrus was quick to establish the Tremont Tavern at the place named Cass to serve the sixteen coaches a day. This native Vermonter had first come in 1833; he had helped to build the Tremont House in Chicago, from which he borrowed the name.

  The other main route west entered DuPage near Salt Creek at Brush Hill, later Fullersburg. It followed the path which would become the Southwestern Plank Road and eventually Ogden Avenue. Naperville served as the con­necting point of the routes that continue south to Oswego and north to Galena. At that juncture on the West Branch of the DuPage River stood the Pre-Emption House which, from 1834, was a renowned tavern serving up to fifty prairie schooners a night.

Castle Inn.
Art by H. Gilbert Foote

Glos Claim in York Township.
from 1874 Atlas & History of DuPage County, Illinois

  The Oswego road continued along the Fox River until it joined Plainfield Road east of Ottawa and on to Springfield and St. Louis. The road to the mining center of Galena was served by another stagecoach running through Warrenville just to the east of the river, where Julius Warren built his tavern.

  As early as 1835 Orente and David Grant, distant relatives of Ulysses, built Castle Inn near today's intersection of York Road and Ogden Avenue. At the height of the plank road's activity, 500 teams of horses a day stopped to pay the toll before that tavern.

The Kline Farm.
Courtesy Forest Preserve District of DuPage County

  Meanwhile, in the northern part of the county, Meacham's first benefited from the 1836 state authorization that selected it as the starting point of a new road to Galena. On July 4th of that year, its citizens hauled a large log behind a team of oxen halfway to Elgin, which had a similar project moving eastward. Where they met, the two parties enjoyed "a grand Independence Day dinner." In the fall the Galena coach changed its run from Naperville to this route, entering the county at Grand Avenue where the Buckhorn Tavern was located at the York intersection. This "state road" would become the contemporary Lake Street (U. S. 20).

  Today's St. Charles Road was laid out in the same year. By 1837 Moses Stacy built his first hostelry, which in 1846 gave way to the tavern still standing in Glen Ellyn at Five Corners. Fifty cents a night would provide supper, lodging, breakfast, and hay for two horses. On that same road in Elmhurst, Gerry Bates and his brother-in-law J. L. Hovey would build in 1 843 the Hill Cottage Tavern, which would later serve several DuPage notables as a home.

  North of Cottage Hill, as Elmhurst was first called, the Western Plank Road was built following the route of Irving Park Road. This construction of three-inch boards laid across a sixteen-foot-wide bed, with tolls every five miles, beginning with a 2½-cent fare for a single rider, was a phenomenon in DuPage County in the early 1850s. Like the stagecoach, plank roads were rendered obsolete within a decade by the railroads.

SPROUTING INSTITUTIONS

  The career of tavern owner and railroad pro­moter Gerry Bates was not as typical as that of farmer John Glos, his neighbor to the east. The 1840 census showed 973 persons in agri­culture, with only 105 in other occupations.

  The manner by which the John Glos family located their acreage also followed a common pattern-one scouting the prospects before others were to follow. John, Jr., made the exploratory expedition. Leaving Bavaria in southern Germany in 1832, he first surveyed rocky New England before hearing of the stone-free Illinois country. The entire family arrived in Chicago in 1837. The older son, speaking English by this time, took his father and his brother Adam to the land office in Chicago. He asked to be shown farm sites, explaining that they had $600 with which to begin their enterprise. The land agent showed them property just west of the Chicago River, where the Northwestern Station now stands. It was swampy, and they declared it unfit for farming. "Let the frogs keep it," John, Sr. muttered. Then on horses furnished by the land agent, they rode west. It was not until they had forded the Des Plaines River and then found the elevation rising markedly, some 100 feet, that they were satisfied. They located on Section 12 in York Township.

  According to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, townships were divided into thirty-six sections, beginning at the northeast corner, they were numbered six across, one down and back, through the sixth row down. So Section 12 placed the Glosses at the county line, in the first small farmhouse north of St. Charles Road where Sandburg Junior High now stands.

  The homestead of Caspar Kline, who first broke ground in 1835 in Winfield Township, has come into the possession of the forest preserve district, which operates it as a typical nineteenth-century farm. The original crops were wheat, barley, and oats. Corn became predominant later in the century as the center of wheat production moved farther west.

  But agriculture was not limited to field crops. Daniel Kelly at the Bloomingdale/Milton bor­der community of Gretna undertook the raising of Merino sheep. By1  870 Luther Bartlett, an 1842 pioneer at the DuPage/Cook County border in Wayne, was to pasture a flock of a thousand sheep. His attempt at growing pear trees, however, met an ill-fated end at the hands of northern Illinois winters.

  Richmond and Vallette in the earliest of county histories (1857) described the wolf hunts that were held annually in Downers Grove Township to rid the farmers of these predators on their livestock. The farmers sta­tioned themselves in a circle several miles in circumference. Upon a prearranged signal, they began their movement toward the center; thus they cornered the beasts for a kill of up to sixty a day. By 1846 wolves were extinct in the county.

  Other enterprises during the pioneer period showed that DuPage was not as exclusively rural as other newly opened lands. Even the early prevalence of clapboard homes over log cabins reflected a less primitive circumstance.

  Representing still another kind of economic interest was George Martin, originally a ship­ping merchant of Edinburgh, Scotland. He came to DuPage in 1832 with his wife Eliza­beth and six-year-old son. Martin was soon followed by his brother-in-law John Christie. Martin's 1833 home of oak and walnut con­struction stood in Naperville until destroyed by fire in 1958. By 1883 George Martin II had erected the Victorian "Pine Craig" home which now houses the Martin-Mitchell Museum. In the meantime the family estab­lished the quarry where Centennial Beach is now located that supplied foundation material for the area.

  On the site of Fort Payne, another Naperville notable, Lewis Ellsworth, organized the DuPage County Nurseries in 1849. The fifty acres embraced the most extensive assortment of fruit and ornamental trees, shrubs, and plants in northern Illinois. Thirty thousand evergreens and plants were imported from Europe in a single season. The transition from survival agriculture to refined horticulture had occurred within the first twenty years of Euro­pean settlement.

  At the other end of the county John Henry Franzen had the first linseed mill in Illinois in operation in 1847. By 1870 the mill was closed and flax crops along with wheat gave way to corn.

  To the southeast of Franzens at Grant Avenue and the county line, Henry F. Fischer (no relation to the Fischers of Churchville) had by 1 850 built the first windmill in the state. Five stories high, its capacity was forty barrels of grain a day. In 1925 the mill became the property of Mt. Emblem Cemetery, where it is still visible from the Tri-State Tollway.

  Before mid-century two other events oc­curred that represented the economic wave of the future. The first took place in 1848 when the long awaited Illinois-Michigan Canal com­menced service five miles south of Brush Hill. The influx of laborers, particularly from Ire­land, temporarily kept Cass a viable com­munity after the end of the stagecoach era. The 1834 Tremont post office, second oldest in the county, was finally discontinued in 1885.

  The Irish also contributed to the second and even more significant development-the build­ing of the Galena and Chicago Union Rail­road in 1849. The "Sons of Erin" were in­volved not only in laying the track but in the trains' operations as well. Daniel Shehan at Babcock's Grove fired the first engine. The first permanent landmark of the Catholic church in the area is St. Mary's Cemetery on Finley Road, north of Butterfield. Here immigrants from Ireland were being buried as early as the 1840s. But before these wheels of pro­gress are followed into the next era, other institutional growth must be noted.

Precincts of 1839.
from The Life and Times of Warrenville Courtesy Leone Schmidt
 

  The political development was represented in the person of Lyman Butterfield whose hold­ings in the vicinity of the present Arrowhead Golf Course were adjacent to neighbor Tullus, whose preemption was being challenged by "jumper" Harmond. When the latter pulled a gun, Butterfield and a Quaker friend placed themselves in front of the muzzle, challenging the interloper to kill "two birds with one stone," if he were to enforce his trespass. After a tense ten minutes Harmond left.

  Likewise, Pierce Downer in 1832 had to confront Wells and Cooley who sought to “squat" on the land he had staked out. When he found them building a cabin there upon his return from a Chicago shopping expedition, his wrath simmered "like a pent sea over a burn­ing volcano." The two not only withdrew, but Wells also left the area altogether, leaving a legitimately staked claim to Israel Blodgett. With neighbor Samuel Curtiss, Blodgett in 1838 cleared Maple Avenue with six oxen hitched to logs.

  It was such pioneer cooperation that ac­counted for the emergence of claim-protecting societies which secured ownership until offi­cial surveys could be made by the federal government in 1842 and land patents issued. The first to be formed was that of Big Woods in 1836, a settlement along Eola Road east of the massive grove that extended from Batavia to Aurora.

  This and the other societies corresponded to the precincts which were to define the county's subdivisions after its detachment from Cook. The others included Naperville, Webster, Deerfield, Washington, Orange, and DuPage. In the first election, held in 1839, the underdog Whigs' win surprised the opposition Demo­crats because in the Jacksonian era most on the frontier identified themselves with the latter party.

  The governmental service first sought and received in every community was postal. Be­sides the post offices established along the main road routes already mentioned, such as Paw Paw station in Naperville (the oldest, established in 1834), there was Route 4311, which stopped at Samuel Curtiss's home on the new road, along which he and Blodgett had planted a row of sugar maple trees. Route 4312 from Cottage Hill west through Langdon (David Kelley's post office at Gretna) con­tinued to the West DuPage Tavern of Giles Billings. Route 4325 ran on Butterfield Road, stopped at Jacob Fuller's place where Utopia and York Center communities later arose; continued on to Samuel Davies's house in the old Bonaparte community; and passed Julius Warren's house on the way to Big Woods and Aurora. Route 4313 extended through Addison and Bloomingdale until it was shifted to Itasca in 1873 because of the railroad's rout­ing.

  Although schools were not a governmental responsibility until 1856, there were already eighteen private subscription schools estab­lished by 1840. Lester Peet of Naperville was the earliest schoolmaster. In neighboring Lisle Thomas Jellies built the first frame school house in 1835.

  In that same year the Benjamin Fullers moved to Brush Hill. This family came with the Atwaters, Austins, Eldridges, Knapps, Reeds, and Thurstons from Broome County, New York. Their settlement in the Oak Brook area was but the last stage of migration for most of this group because they had previously moved together to Broome from Washington County, New York. Atwater sisters, Olive, Anna, and Rachel were married to Benjamin Fuller, Robert Reed, and Edward Eldridge respec­tively. Fuller located on the Mayslake site, next to the remnants of an Indian village, where he taught the Indians how to shoe horses. Within twenty years he had purchased 800 acres, so that it was natural to call the com­munity Fullersburg by the time he platted it in 1851.

Mary Fuller- an early teacher in the Fullersburg area.
Courtesy Hinsdale Historical Society
 

  In the meantime, his sister Mary was the first teacher in what became Salt Creek District 48. The schoolhouse was a cabin at the southwest corner of York and Roosevelt roads.

  Sharing the educational function were the early churches, which brought the settlers not only the Good News but also the news on issues such as Abolition and Prohibition from outside the area. The earliest religious organ­izations divided less along Protestant and Catholic lines than they did between American and German church groups. Congregation­alist, Methodist, and Baptists characterized the former; Evangelicals, Lutherans, and Roman Catholics the latter.

  On July 13, 1833, the First Presbyterian Church of DuPage was organized near the forks of the East and West Branches under the leadership of the Rev. Jeremiah Porter. By August, 1834 the group was meeting in the Naper settlement; there it changed its name to the First Congregational Church of DuPage, since most of its members had been of that tradition. The move to Naperville was also motivated by what the Rev. Edwin R Davis described at the church's fiftieth anniversary: "The place [Naperville] in the early days was notorious for its wickedness. Intemperance, profanity, Sabbath breaking and infidelity abounded in it. ... Brother Clark desired to save the people from the calamity of becoming barbarians." Morris Sleight donated land upon which a building was erected in 1845.

  By that date three other Congregationalist societies had been founded in the county: Downers Grove in 1837, Lisle in 1842, and Big Woods in 1844. The last of these reflected the rising Abolitionist sentiments, since it was led by Thomson Paxton, the Scotch Irishman who had left Tennessee because of his oppo­sition to slavery. He became disaffected with the Presbyterian church of Batavia, which he and other neighbors had helped form, because the national Presbyterian church had failed to take a strong stand on this issue in 1842. They withdrew to organize the Big Woods Congre­gational Church, whose building still stands on Eola Road.

  By 1837 the Methodists were conducting class meetings in Cass, Gary's Mill, Stacy Corners, Orangeville(Wayne Center), Copen­hagen (on Route 59 at the southern border of the county), and Big Woods. The mother church for Methodist churches in the southern end of the county was Cass, where Stephen R Beggs rode the circuit in the 1830s. A 200 pound, six-foot-tall son of a Revolutionary War veteran, Beggs had such a voice that one pioneer averred that he could be heard a quarter of a mile away. To settlements as far flung as twelve miles south of Ottawa he traveled with stops at Downers Grove and Naperville in between. Blodgett relatives, the Horace Dodges and Eliphalet Strongs, hosted him at Strong's Hill on today's Hidden Lake Forest Preserve. He also wrote the book Pages from the Early History of the West and Northwest.

  Gary's Mill was the focal point for other Methodist activity. It was in Gary's Mill School that Jesse Wheaton and Orinda Gary exchanged their wedding vows, concluding a romance which Rufus Blanchard describes in his 1882 History of DuPage County, Illinois: "Cupid is more unerring in his darts in new countries^....... These two Pomfret, Connecticut, families were also to be joined again as Warren Wheaton was to marry Harriet Rickard, daughter of a Gary sister. These were 1837 charter members of the church founded at the home of Charles Gary, who, in addition to operating the sawmill, serving as a county postmaster and justice of the peace, became an ordained lay preacher."

The Wheaton brothers moved east to the 600-acre preemption and plowed a furrow around it, and they took their Methodist con­victions with them. In 1840 Jesse Wheaton voted for James G. Birney, the Abolitionist candidate for president. In 1 843 the brothers were active in forming the Wesleyan Metho­dist church, which was organized in opposi­tion to slavery, liquor, and Freemasonry.

The Baptists were also identified with the growing Abolitionist sentiment. The Baptist church in Warrenville was host to the North­western Baptist Anti-Slavery Convention in 1845. Among those attending were Baptist members from Bloomingdale, where services were first held in 1840, and where an 1849 building still serves as headquarters for the community's park district.

The German churches prior to 1850 were mostly Protestant. The earliest, Zion Evan­gelical in Naperville, whose 1840 building remains the oldest church structure in the county and serves as headquarters for the Naperville Heritage Society, began in 1837. The fifteen charter members were from Penn­sylvania and were of the Evangelical and United Brethren denomination.

 A year later a church composed of Lutheran and Reformed believers was organized at the southern end of Dunklee's Grove. Its exten­sive influence will be noted in the next chapter.

The Irish Roman Catholics were meeting at St. Patrick's in Cass in 1846. In that same year twenty-five German-speaking families from Alsace-Lorraine constructed St. Raphael's in Naperville, which by 1864, when it was named SS. Peter and Paul, had become the largest church in the county. Among these was Joseph Wherli, who also became the church's finan­cial angel in 1848, when he assumed the indebtedness which threatened to put the building up for auction. One of Wherli's daughters, Mary, married Joseph F. Drendel whose grandfather had run a hotel in Chicago, where the federal building now stands, before buying 300 acres in Lisle Township.

Big Woods Congregational Church Art by A. Gilbert Foote

  From these Alsatian families, including Alois Schwartz, Xavier Reidy, and Joseph Yackley, came young men who joined hundreds from DuPage as Forty-Niners in the Gold Rush. Sheldon Peck's son Charles painted an eighteen-foot by nine-foot canvas Panorama of California which toured the nation. By the time some of these adventurers had returned home, they found that DuPage had passed beyond the pioneer era.